Welcome to an Uppsala Forum Guest Lecture entitled “Canadian Family Policy: Gender Equity and Reconciliation Challenges” with Uppsala Forum Visiting Fellow Susan Prentice, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Despite its importance for gender equity, as well as greater Indigenous justice, family policy is poorly developed in Canada, as it is in most liberal welfare states. One consequence is that Canada experiences high rates of child poverty, and significant inequality. Indigenous children and families are even more disadvantaged than non-Indigenous children. Liberal commitments to market solutions mean, in particular, that early childhood education and care services are scarce, expensive, and often of dubious quality. For institutional and ideological reasons, Canada’s childcare policy architecture creates significant care deficits, compounding gender inequality and failing to generate generational justice. This crisis is even more sharply experienced in Indigenous communities, despite the call by the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission for culturally appropriate early childhood education programs for Aboriginal families. As a result, social movements and Indigenous organizations and governments are actively organizing to protest inequalities and demand systemic change.